Using technology to get my business on the ladder to success

The property industry isn't regulated, which often puts tenants, landlords, sellers and buyers at risk. I opened my own Martin & Co franchise covering the Rotherham and Chesterfield areas in 2006, with the aim of changing this. As voluntary members of the Lettings Property Ombudsman, we give our clients the trust and assurance they need that we are adhering to industry best practice.

Many of our customers are people going through a highly stressful time and are reliant on the telephone to put the sale or letting to go through efficiently, so we need to ensure we can always respond to any questions or concerns they have. We answer calls 24/7 and put customer service at the forefront of what we do. Since implementing RingCentral's cloud-based telephone system, customers can always get through to the right person at the right time and we've seen a surge in customer satisfaction.

Our team members need the flexibility of working from different locations while still being fully connected, and RingCentral allows us to ensure that happens. Our Bring Your Own Device policy gives employees the freedom to use their own device, and the RingCentral mobile app allows them to route calls and send important documentation to clients or back to the office on the fly. This means they are always 100% productive, no matter where they choose to work from.

The telephone system is so easy to use. I don't need an IT team to manage it - each individual employee can log onto their own RingCentral account and configure their phones to suit them. We're a small office so it works for us financially too - there's no hardware taking up office space and costs are completely transparent. We can also scale the cloud-based system in line with our business expansion plans.

In an industry like ours, we are often a faceless name at the end of a telephone for people that are going through a very important and stressful period of their lives. So we're exploring new ways of communicating with our clients, such as HD video conferencing, for those who can't come into the office often, or to communicate with tenants and assess which contractors to send out if they are experiencing any urgent issues in their rented properties.

We're huge ambassadors of innovative technology that helps run and grow our business successfully, and cloud technology like RingCentral is helping us do just that.

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Article attributed to Tony Deveney, Franchisee, Martin & Co.